The Pool as a Symbol

Belano usually opened a story by narrating the protagonist’s infancy: he would sculpt the character in the reader’s mind through interpretable moments. Recently he had discovered that his obsession with early stages, with the development of people both real and imagined, was in good measure due to his compulsion to classify it all, to chart the world and compel it until it fit in his grids. He wasn’t thus unlike a bad reader of philosophy or fiction, those who open the book and check the number of pages straight away, how many days and hours until the climax of having read this, a process which resulted in zero change for both reader and book (unlike the river, which rapes you ontologically).

Belano’s biggest success coincided with Lena’s greatest defeat. That night, they met at the Pompidou museum. He barely mustered the courage to tell her he had won the ghost writer competition. His vocabulary didn’t contemplate Lena’s suffering.

‘Can’t blame you’ she said in French, suspicious of his guilt. ‘For a nègre a personal defeat is damn near impossible.’

The French term nègre, although perhaps politically incorrect in his language, made more sense to him than the English alternative, a ‘ghost writer’. Lately, after a long writing session, Belano would dream that he had died and was slowly crawling through an ink swamp, an infinite tour through the words of every nègre in history, even Homer’s protonegros! He kept going like so until it occurred to him to check his pockets, where he would find a pill. Unlike so many dreams that end right before the protagonist’s death, Belano’s always finished by taking the pill meant to bring him back to life.

Belano found P’s package in his mailbox. It dealt with the finalists of the real competition, the reason the one he had won existed (a success, true, somewhat diminished after that night with Lena, but P. remained one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, and Belano remained their choice). Inside the box he found the dossier of every finalist. These were his characters or, rather, P’s characters, with whom Belano had to start getting familiarized.

He suspected some irony laid within a competition for authors, yet he couldn’t say exactly where it laid. He believed the truth drew nearer when he recalled the rumors he had heard months earlier. Apparently P. had considered moving the writers to a house to film them, with judges tasked with eliminating one per week until only the victor stood. However, P. had partly decided against this tactic, wisely replacing the camera crew for ink and paper. Belano’s ink and paper, that is, unbeknownst to the world.

A week later, his first news report arrived:

Xin, the Korean writer’s alias, had written a story of strong sexual content taking place in 2040’s China a bug in the virtual reality headsets teleported everyone’s characters to the same orgiastic paradise. All is beautiful. But the illusion crumbles when the attractive avatars fail, thus unveiling the true faces hiding underneath. Clery and Ametrano discussed neo-surrealism; accused each other of ‘not getting it’. Krish theorized that machines would sooner or later replace human authors, fate which he planned to dodge with his so-called ‘flash writing’; Lindgren stated that Krish’s hypothesis wasn’t unlike the process he already utilized, named ‘adaptative method’, and he added that awaiting the epoch of literary computers would be to undermine the role of vanity in art. Cash made cryptic moments regarding Vedanta and played a song he had written. And so forth.

Belano sat down to narrate what the news had brought him, to organize chaos: an actor without an audience. Working as a ghost writer helped him inasmuch as it carried a sense of urgency, there was a deadline to meet. But this time, every hour he spent writing seemed to drive him closer to another deadline entirely, to the ink swamps, a surreptitious blackness. ‘When was the last time I wrote something for myself?’ thought Belano. He doubted whether he would ever recover the discipline to write without anybody expecting his pages, whether he would regain the strength to finish a story just to throw it out a window, or to use it for his chimney, or to level a neighbor’s piano.

‘I’d have to suffer a reverse identity crisis to be able to write fiction again’ he told himself. Belano hesitated for a moment, then began seasoning P’s story with minimal imaginary details.

The previous week, Baudoin, the Frenchman who wrote essays in short story form and vice versa, had been eliminated. This week time had come for Ametrano, the Venezuelan writer, to go. As surprising as some of the eliminations were, they never caught Belano off guard; for he was beginning to feel as an organic part of the system sawn by P. Was he not, after all, each competitor and the house, the judges and every hand behind every story? Was he not the executioner of this narrative hydra, created for his avid audience?

Somewhere in the city, Lena was annoyed by Belano’s inability or unwillingness to return her calls.

Cash wrapped up his meditation session and walked onto the porch. He sat on a reclining chair and lit an American Spirit. Ametrano’s departure had surprised him greatly: he had a sharp style, phrases that caught your attention from the very first instant and tied you down until the end. On the other hand, Ametrano was a notorious drug addict; it was no longer strange to find him passed out in the hallway on a puddle of his own puke, or looking half-dead and preaching the return of Beelzebub. When the Swedish competitor, Lindgren, told him that the Beat generation was long gone, that he ought to go to rehab and let serious writers work in peace, Ametrano stared him down with Philistine fury and stormed off.

Cash thought that the talent of the Swedish contender was as undeniable as the antipathy he bred in others. Personally, detesting him ran against his spiritual principles. Regardless, the more they learnt of his adaptative method, the more it seemed to them not an artistic but a scientific feat, hence something cold and distant. Cash wondered whether Lindgren actually enjoyed doing all that market research, analyzing with software the most quoted phrases to then deconstruct them and imitate them, investigating the most popular themes demographically to choose an appropriate one, etc. The others had nicknamed him ‘the Swedish sniper’.

Xin walked down the cobblestone path towards the porch. He sat near Cash, who didn’t let this bother him and held his thoughtful pose, which consisted of placing the space between his index finger and thumb under his chin, with both fingers outstretched.

‘I once had a friend who sat just like you’ Xin muttered without looking at him. ‘He was a calm and reasonable man. He died screaming’.

An aversive sentiment shot through Cash’s bloodstream. Showing this went counterpart to his spiritual principles, so he chose to light a new cigarette instead. So far Cash had managed to delight the judges. If there was one person besides Lindgren capable of stealing his crown, it must’ve been the Korean.

‘I read your story on virtual reality’ said Cash. ‘You think we’re headed somewhere similar?’

‘Man seeks union to something. He will create literature to justify what he belongs to. Does it come before or after our beliefs? That’s the issue.’

Cash didn’t quite get this. He nodded.

Belano had followed sales for his episodes. His creative licenses were measured dangers: P. had let them pass thus far. He also knew, thanks to his experience behind the curtains of the industry, that the endeavor was going far too well for P. to allow itself any delays. They had promised one episode per week to an impatient public. No, they wouldn’t risk finding another nègre at this point either, Belano bet. There were only a handful of episodes left until the end of the series, plus Belano’s style was well-arrayed in the collective unconscious by then. To bring about a substitute ghost writer would imply his absorbing and replicating Belano’s style, then writing several drafts for the next episode on time. In seven days? Now certain he was irreplaceable, our nègre progressively let his imagination go wild.

To add insult to P’s impotence, the more Belano invented, the more his episode sold copies, the more people talked about them. Business was business.

Cash and Xin said see-you-later to Lindgren and headed to the pool area, discussing the semiotic step from impression to concept.  It would be the last time they would see the Swedish sniper. Night fell.

The following morning, as Cash cleaned his knife, the judged silently read Xin’s story. It was the third and last one cued up; only three writers remained in the house. Two of the judges praised his ability to change his style and genre at will. Another judge reflected on the open ending, wondered why the author had chosen the pool as a symbol in the final sequence. An urgent call interrupted their deliberation. A security guard was doing his early rounds when he had found a body in the bottom of a red sea. The chorine had started to decompose the epidermis, to split the eye lashes, to degrade the victim’s pale visage, rendering it almost transparent. The judge who had picked up the phone hung up without a word. He looked at his colleagues one by one, then turned slowly towards Xin’s story, which he still had in his right hand.

When the police arrived, the officers on the copilot seats put away P’s final episode and approached the perimeter, handguns drawn. They busted Cash smoking on the porch next to a book by one Alan Watts. An officer looked at Cash repulsively: ‘you were my favorite one’ he said, ‘how could you’. They handcuffed him and put him in the squad car.

Down at the station, they opened a dossier for Cash, but had to wash his hands before his finger prints could be taken. There, in front of the mirror, the ink on his fingers dripped down the sink, zigzagged through the drain pipes and finally diluted without a trace.